What is Reddit's opinion of
ZBrush?
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See, here's the thing. You use the terms "model" and "ZBrush" in the same sentence, not understanding that ZBrush doesn't do modelling. It does sculpting, and until you know what the difference is, ZBrush isn't likely to be of much use to you.
My advice would be to start with an actual modelling package (3ds Max, Maya, Blender if you want open source, there are millions) and until you have a basic understanding of 3dcg and how it works (topology, subdivision, deformation, rigging, etc), stay away from ZBrush. The reason I say this is that ZBrush will heavily corrupt your understanding of 3dcg, and leave you having to re-learn everything when you actually want to do anything with your models. A good rule of thumb is don't even open ZBrush until you can build your own base mesh.
If all you want to do is sculpt a really high resolution mesh for a render or two, DynaMesh will suffice to serve that goal. But any retopology that DynaMesh produces will be absolutely horrible for animation due to the complete lack of edge flow or anything resembling good topology.
All that said, if you're really determined to start with ZBrush, Pixologic has it's very own ZClassroom filled with all the tutorials you could possibly want.
Zbrush probably, if he uses it. (or Sculptris for free). Pixologic.com
A popular workflow is:
- Maya to do a quick build of a model (or do it in Zbrush with Zspheres or whatevs),
- Zbrush to sculpt details into the model and make maps for it,
- Back to Maya for Rigging and Animation.
I don't really know of any books though, I get most of my tutorials online.
The Zbrush download center has a bunch of good stuff: http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter/
This was posted on Polycount recently and it's got some interesting stuff: http://www.polycount.com/2011/08/10/custom-brushes-with-orb/#more-7580
It's a free 3D sculpting software from the guys that made Zbrush.
I don't know shit about modelling but I can make decent faces and bodies with this program, it's like sculpting clay.
I replied to someone else, but I figured I'd reply to you also, so you'd be able to see it without having to remember to check this post.
They switch between Sculptris and ZBrush many times, most likely using GoZ.
Sculptris is like the free version of Zbrush if you don't know, made by the same people. (Pixologic)
Don't start it up and stare at a blank canvas, have something in mind that you want to model first.
For specifics, youtube videos and pixologic's classroom will teach you the ins and outs of everything you'll need. http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/
Play with Sculptris a bit. It's basically the $0 equivalent of Zbrush. It lets you sculpt and paint a model fairly intuitively.
It isn't designed to do low poly modeling, but it lets you rough out a shape and texture easily without worrying about topology and UV mapping. It has a poly reduction brush you can use but it's not the best option. Ideally you would take the model into Blender or Max or what have you to retopo and make a low poly model.
Kenn Yap's ArtStation.
The 3D base was sculpted in ZBrush.
It's zbrush. Be wary, it requires a a lot of power from your computer when you start getting into super high poly counts (which you inevitably will, it's zbrush) and may not be easy for beginners at 3d modeling to grasp. That said their website http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/ has lots of support for getting started. http://www.3dtotal.com/index_tutorial.php also has good tutorials. I would recommend trying out 3DS Max or Maya as well if you want to give 3d a shot.
There are a lot of great resources for Zbrush on their site: http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/ And the ZBrush Central forums have a lot of good stuff.
Tutorials for maya is a trickier deal. I'd just google for a couple hours. 3D Kingdom used to have a lot of great tuts.
Dude. Do you Have Sculptris Alpha 6?
The guy who wrote Sculptris was hired by Pixologic.. the Makers of ZBrush, and the latest version of Sculptris is free for download here!
http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/
Every person with a videocard should get this NOW!!!!!
Dynamesh not up to your standards?
Well then, allow me to introduce you to UV Mater!
Still no? Try Insert Multi Mesh or retopologize with QRemesher!
But what's that you say? How can I do any of this when even the academic licence is way too expensive?
Well...uh...
Sure thing--it's a very interesting interview actually!
http://www.pixologic.com/interview/mass-effect3/1/
edit: ALTHOUGH, I am incorrect! I misread this the first time through I guess:
>We basically re-worked all the characters from ME2. Since we were re-using character models from ME2 we couldn't change their topology and rigging. So we used ZBrush to re-work the details, often redesigning the character from scratch and improving all the normal maps and textures.
So, All the characters were REWORKED as far as details and all of that, but the actual MODELS remained the same. Nevertheless, still a LOT of work to redo all the art for the Collector characters that had never been in Mass Effect 3 before--they couldn't just reuse other assets like they did when they made the N7 classes.
Reference reference reference, The human face is just a bunch of plane shifts and that is the first thing you need to morph your sphere into before you start sculpting eyes and stuff.
Take a look at these pictures. http://philippefaraut.com/store/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/p/l/planes.jpg http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a12/lordkuragari/FacePlanes.jpg http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/artistinaction/scotteaton/foundation/images/heads.jpg
>I can imagine it generates solid models
Surface meshes actually. They come with software to fix holes in the surfaces and remove unwanted background surfaces.
The meshes are usually smooth enough to work with, and imperfections can easily be fixed with software like Sculptris
>Most importantly though...you havent seen Iron Man?
Haha yeah, I know I'm a horrible human being. Is it a true must-see?
Easily one of the best builds I've seen in Minecraft.
I saw in one of your other videos you mentioned you always wanted to get into 3D...have you ever tried Sculptris? It's free and pretty awesome.
It's a lot like sculpting so it would probably suit your organic style pretty well. It's better, I feel, for character builds, but you can build some set pieces with it, I'm sure.
Check it out: http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/
Minecraft is great and I'm addicted to it as well...but it aint paying my bills!
He's actually switching between photoshop and Deep Paint 3D, one of its features is projection mapping, which is what he's using in the tutorial. the program is pretty old and i'm not sure if it works with windows 8 http://www.righthemisphere.com/products/dp3d/Deep3D_UV/index.html though i'm sure there are modern equivalents, i'll look into it when it's not past 1am
edit: actually i lied, found something. looks like this zbrush plugin does about the same thing as Deep Paint 3D http://www.pixologic.com/blog/2010/10/zapplink-for-zbrush-4-is-now-available/
edit: i have confirmed that it does, indeed, do exactly the same thing
ZBrush is a great tool for organic modelling and high poly counts. I find that there's always a general process to follow:
Reference- find reference images, use spotlight or imageplane to display them in ZBrush Base Mesh - use zspheres or a maya import for the base model Detail - sculpt detail at high sdiv levels Texturing - polypaint or project textures using spotlight UV Maps - get uv coordinates made using UV Master Exporting - export the model as an obj for any 3d program or ma for maya preserving the texture maps
digital tutors, lynda.com, and the pixologic zclassroom as Ponkers mentions are also good resources to learn, as well as the zbrush documentation site at: http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Main_Page
This might be totally off the mark, but if you want to work with blobs Sculptris is a free modeling tool that feels like working with clay. It's aimed at game or film production, not engineering - but it sure has blobs.
I wish. I used to do a lot more design work, but the market in my country basically collapsed, so now I do something else while this is just a way to keep/improve the skills (well, this sort of thing and the occasional freelance job).
As for other programs - I have used all sorts of things over time, currently for organic 3D modelling Sculptris is very nice (and free!), for technical 3D stuff I'd use a solid modelling/CAD package and then use 3DS MAX to bring those things together. In 2D it's the default choice of Photoshop and then CorelDRAW for vector work (just used to it).
At the end of the day most of it is self-learned and all the tricks and such just come from experience.
Thanks! This is what I came across via google. I've heard it's like digital clay, I think that's why it interests me more. Plus I have a CINTIQ, so I think it'll be fun to use Zbrush with!
Personally, I enjoy doing the re-topology in Zbrush using zspheres. This might be useful to you.
My workflow goes something like: Max (base mesh) -> Zbrush (sculpt) -> Zbrush (retopologize to low poly) -> Max (unwrap new low poly) -> Xnormal (mapping w/ high and low poly obj's).
EDIT: The process of creating the new topology in zbrush can seem tricky at first, but there are a few tricks that, once you get the hang of it, really make it a smooth process.
What they don't tell you is all of the CGI is done with a software product called Z-Brush which is phenomenal. In the hands of a master designer it can give you Davy Jones and his homies in all of their CG glory. Hell of a price tag on the product but if you master that you'd be a God amongst Hollywood mortals.
Try Sculptris, it's an attempt by someone to get the same results in a simpler interface (guy was eventually hired by Pixologic, which is why they're the ones offering it). It's also free, but gives a similar feel to ZBrush
I haven't used it, yet, but I hear good things about Sculpturis.
When it comes to assembly, you might want to look into mold making and vacu-forming.
~~My google-fu isn't working at the moment but I remember reading a blog about a guy~~ This guy made a Daft Punk helmet that has similar elements.
I know that you can reduce the amount of polygons in Maya, so you probably can in Blender as well.
Usually you work the other way, you start working from low poly and dividing the polys upwards (You can keep saved models at any stage of poly divisions, also you can bake the normals from the highest mesh onto the lowest mesh, I recommend to get familiar with zBrush).
Reduce the polys down down down to something like 500-1000 polygons, and sculpt your way up using zBrush, it'll give you good training and its good fun.
I don't know why GGentzel facepalmed, it's completely fine if you want to keep high-res models for cutscenes, but I would personally animate, render and what-not in Maya, export it and composite, fix and render out of AE or Nuke for good cutscene results. Then pull the videos into Unity.
Sadly, they are all - pretty much - unintuitive and buggy.
When I say unintuitive... well, if you've been there from the beginning, a lot of the things that seem odd make perfect sense and do address some oft-occurring issues.
I, personally, use Lightwave. Many people see this as perverse, and I certainly would not recommend it to a beginner.
Many people would suggest starting with a sculpting, digital-clay like system first, but that may not be great if you were thinking of getting into game art. If you're just interested in high polycount modelling, then have a play with Sculptris: http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/
For learning 3D design polygon-by-polygon, I have heard that Google's SketchUp is reasonable (http://sketchup.google.com/download/).
Both of those programs will help you develop skills that you can bring into other programs. Once you've learned what you can do and the sort of operations you are comfortable with, learning another program is mainly just a process of finding out how to do those things in a new environment, then adding on any nifty new features you discover.
A lot of the fancier features in most software - deformations and so on - are snares to trap the inexperienced. The more you rely on the software to do things for you, the more likely you are to have a horribly deformed mesh.
For the curious, the program he used at the beginning is a Sculltris and is free, then he switches to ZBrush. They're pretty cool 3D programs, I've made a few timelapse videos. Here is my shameless plug.
3D Sculpting: Sculptris
Which happened to get bought out by pixologic (who made zbrush). Which happens to be the program used for a lot of 3d (skyrim, avatar, avengers). So you know that sculptris must be pretty sexay.
I use Sculptris (FREE).
Actually Pixelogic (the same company that makes Zbrush) bought out this little program a few years ago being built by one guy. It's was surprisingly powerful in the condition he left it in. Pixelogic has actually added very little in terms of new functionality to it besides the ability to switch between it and Zbrush.
PlatformSix makes a good point, the object should generally be a lower poly model. You can accomplish high levels of apparent visual detail on low poly models using Displacement Maps, and Normal Maps (like you said) in ZBrush by taking a high poly model with lots of detail and going to a lower SDiv level while projecting these maps onto it (which make use of the higher sdiv level detail by saving them in a texture format using ZBrush algorithms).
http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Creating_Displacement_Maps
http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Bump,_Displacement,_and_Normal_Maps
All of these can be found in the Tool menu set.
You'd be much better off scrounging up some free spare art assets and just using those as filler until your game is really showing some gameplay and programming promise. Learning the pipeline for art from zbrush to baking it and getting it in engine would take months in itself to become decent in.
If you want to make it in this field, you should have a focus in this industry, be it art or programming or animation. If you're already good with programming i'd highly recommend staying in that direction, "the grass is always greener" as they say.
As for Zbrush their free online classroom is pretty decent for getting started:
http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/
BTW if you have specific art questions that's my main background. There are some great community sites if you don't want to take my advice and want to dabble in art as well:
The makers of Z-brush also make another program that goes by the name of Sculptris or something along that line.(pretty sure they bought out the company that made it to be honest.) It's a free program, and has a lot of very basic features.
Everything Autodesk makes is awesome, but it's so damn technical! I rarely have a clear-enough idea in my head to start building from scratch there.
Organic is the way to go for base models, IMO. Check out Zbrush, if you haven't yet: http://www.pixologic.com/home.php
They have a free version called Sculptris that is really great as well, I've been told. In fact, I'm tempted to download it because I've heard that for just straight simple modelling its simpler and less technical than Zbrush.
If you like drawing in Photoshop, give Corel Painter a try. There's a demo and the essentials version I linked above is cheap. I like Photoshop too, but I find that Painter gives much more rewarding 'interaction' with the digital medium, as you are able to play around with many more different types of materials / brushes / pencils / crayons, etc.
ZBrush is also a lot of fun to play around with.
Zbrush and Photoshop, you can learn Zbrush directly from Pixologic for free here http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/
You can also find a lot of good tutorials on youtube just by searching "Zbrush basics"
At first I thought it was a fire warrior from the thumbnail. Then I noticed it was not... then I noticed this is not the warhammer subreddit.
Touche gaming... Nice drawing, ever tried your hand at sculpting? Sculptris is a great, easy to use free program.
http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/
don't know if you saw them or not but there are some intro videos at the bottom there. i'm sure there are some good tutorials on youtube, or check zbrushcentral.com or if you have some extra cash buy the gnomon dvd on zbrush character sculpting. good luck!
Superb composite work, sir! If you can get your hands on a copy of ZBrush, it's really fun to play around with... Hope to see more of your stuff sometime... Be sure to check out r/photoshop too.